


Mordechai's Awakening

by RegalMisfortune



Series: AIs of Overwatch [3]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Katya Volskaya Mentioned, Lynx Seventeen is also mentioned but not included, Mei and Brigitte are mostly backround but brigitte has one or two lines, Post-Recall, Post-Searching, Tracer is also mentioned, Tumblr request, Zarya is very frustrated and suspicious about everything throughout this whole thing, a request for two people trapped in a slow elevator went too far
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-06-21 20:42:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15566022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RegalMisfortune/pseuds/RegalMisfortune
Summary: After stumbling across an old Overwatch base in the heart of Siberia, Zarya's stuck playing babysitter with a bunch of "ex"-Overwatch scientists who try to toggle the old building together and look out for old confidential or dangerous things left behind from their heyday.However, the longer Zarya stands in this old, rickety elevator with this one small "guest" that she doesn't remember from the drop-off, the more suspicious she gets that something is afoot.





	Mordechai's Awakening

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a friend.

The elevator wouldn’t go fast enough.

Power in the old Overwatch base in the heart of the Siberian tundra was minimal, the generators on the upper floors only able to power the first six floors. A gorilla of all things was working on it, muttering to… itself? Himself?

Zarya pressed her lips into an unamused, thin line, arms folded across her chest as the elevator made some horrible creaking noises as it ventured slowly down into the depths. The young mechanic, Brigitte, had said it simply needed to be greased but otherwise was safe enough, and thus was the only safe way to getting down to the lower floors, while the stairs were decidedly unsafe for normal use.

She didn’t like this. The Russian Defense Force had stumbled across this base, forgotten in the trees and below the earth, and the familiar insignias were enough to call it in. Overwatch bases sometimes were notorious for containing old storages of chemicals, weapons, and other things that may still be either classified or dangerous after years of disuse. Some, like this one, even escaped being thoroughly searched and scrapped when Overwatch was dismantled.

The call had gone to Chairman Volskaya, and she was keeping it under wraps from the general public, while at the same time reaching out to an old member of Overwatch to see if there was any way the Russians could use it as an outpost while they handled any… confidential material.

Volskaya was playing at something again, Zarya just knew it.

An old member of Overwatch was suspiciously looking like a secretly reforming Overwatch in Zarya’s eyes, remembering seeing the gorilla, the young mechanic, a short, Chinese scientist that Zarya vaguely remembered from a newscast about a survivor in the Antarctic after ten years of cryo. She was certain she had heard the notorious Tracer as well through the comms, but she couldn’t be sure without seeing her.

And then there was this fellow.

Zarya dropped her eyes down, far down, to the small young man who stood beside her as stiff as the steel around them. She couldn’t see much of his face aside from the plethora of freckles that speckled across his nose, the hood of his coat pulled far down over his ears, looking perpetually cold. She couldn’t blame him, being no taller than five foot and very thin if judging his pale hands.

She had only gotten into this situation because Zarya had seen him step into the elevator, and he had been without an escort, as the others did, the Russians not trusting the so-called ex-Overwatch members do their work. Zarya especially did not trust them, as this Winston hadn’t told them who else he was bringing along, and Zarya was pretty sure that both the young mechanic and this lad had been far too young when Overwatch fell to be a part of it. Not only that, she wasn’t sure if she remembered seeing this one come off the transport with the others either, although he was small enough that she may have had missed it.

Yet… then again, she had seen the Chinese scientist- Mei? And she wasn’t very tall either.

Nevertheless, Zarya volunteered to watch over this one, since no one else seemed to be. He was small enough for her to throw with one hand and without any effort at all, so if he did get into anything suspicious, it would easy just to pick him up and carry him away with just a finger hooked into the back of his collar.

“What floor?”

Zarya’s heavily-accented English started the young man (he was barely even that, the way his head turned to look up to her and she realized with clarity that he couldn’t be older than twenty-one). Red hair peeked out from under the hood as he tilted his head back to look up, up, and up some more to see her looking down at him. His pupils were gold- she also noted. Augments? Some sort of novelty surgery? It seemed to drown out the pale blue that the rest of his eyes were colored, regardless of what he had done to his eyes.

“…Sixth,” he finally managed to get out, his voice soft and lilted in an accent she didn’t recognize. He turned his head back down to stare at the rusty spot on the door and he hadn’t moved since then. Hadn’t said anything either. It was very… awkward.

“…What’s on the sixth floor?” Zarya had to ask- the awkwardness was too unbearable, and she needed something to focus on that wasn’t the grinding, creaking awfulness of the elevator.

Again, her words had startled him- forcibly bringing him back to reality. His hands had immediately gone to picking at his sleeves at that as he worried his lip with his teeth before speaking.

“There’s a… a stairwell. It leads down to the servers. It’s… there’s a secondary main generator down there. I’m going to turn it on.”

“If there was a secondary generator, why did not the gorilla go and turn it on?”

The way that the young man curled his shoulders to his ears and fell quiet again made Zarya very suspicious. How did he know about this secondary generator, without anyone else knowing, especially the older members? Why was he going down here by himself and without telling the others?

Apparently the glaring to the top of his head finally got through to him, as the young man tucked his chin under his collar and muttered: “It’s an S-Class base design. There’s only four in Overwatch since it was too costly to produce as it was built underground rather than surface. A server room was built as an off-shoot from the rest of the stairwells for safety purposes, since it would prevent easy hacking or manipulation. The secondary generator was also put in there and would only trip if the main generator was unexpectedly shut off or burnt out, rather than simply being turned off. Due to its position, it would be in better condition than the main generator. It would also turn on all computer systems, lights, and security. However, the room was on a need-to-know basis and left out of the schematics, thus very few within Overwatch itself knew of its existence to begin with before its fall.”

Zarya couldn’t help but blink at him, who simply kept on staring at the door. That was… a lot to take in. Apparently the kid had a lot in his head that made up for the lack in height. Yet it still didn’t make any sense _why_ he knew all this, especially if it was all secret and forgotten like he claimed. What would a boy who had to be younger than she by at least seven years know of a room that only possibly a handful of people during Overwatch’s heydays would know?

But before she could open her mouth to speak, the elevator jarred to a halt, the door grinding open to the semi-darkness.

The rooms beyond were only lit by the emergency lighting, some bulbs out and others flickering. The space was filled with tables, benches, chairs, a long counter that backed into a kitchen. A mess hall, then.

“An odd place for a secret door,” Zarya couldn’t help but utter, yet when she turned to glance over at the small redhead, she found him gone from her spot by her side. “What-?”

Her neck nearly cracked when she snapped it around, spotting the boy hurriedly pressing his hand against a wall on the other side of the room. “HEY!” she shouted at him, and nearly tripped as she ran right into the corner of a bench as she tried to make her way to him.

Panicked eyes glinted back at her in the dim lighting as wall he was standing by silently slid open, and as soon as she reached out to grab him by the scruff of his neck, he had all but fallen into the dark space that laid beyond and the wall shut again, causing her fist to hit the metal.

“Open this door!”

“Please just listen to me!”

“I will when you open this damn door!”

Zarya slammed her fist against it again, the sound ringing in the dark room. But barely a dent was put into the wall- what kind of _metal_ was it made from?

“I am sorry, Zaryanova,” the quiet, muffled voice came from beyond the wall. And he had the audacity to truly _sound_ apologetic. “But this is something I must do. I… I know you’ll understand.”

Zarya put her ear to the door, but the young man’s steps were already retreating. “Shit,” she hissed through her teeth, before jamming a finger to her ear and activate her communicator.

“Someone put me on with the damn monkey!”

There was a flurry of Russian in her ear, confusion and concern over her ire, but someone did pass off their communicator to Winston, as his deep voice sounded through the small device.

“ _Sergeant-“_

_“_ I don’t know what game you’re playing at,” she growled back, cutting off the gorilla scientist. “But one of your “agents” just went into a secret door and off on their own accord!”

There was a pause, and at first Zarya thought that Winston didn’t hear her, but then-

“ _Sergeant, everyone is accounted for on Floor Three.”_

“Then _who_ the _FUCK_ just went in here?!”

As soon as the words left her mouth, icy realization filled her veins with utter dread. If all of Winston’s little “friends” were already accounted for, then she had just let go a third-party interloper _without realizing it_.

“Everyone UP!” she called to everything through the communicator in Russian, hopefully catching attention to those who were still outside and most undoubtedly relaxing. “We have an intruder!”

“ _What floor_?” Winston’s voice cut in again with English, and Zarya swapped back, glad that at least the monkey came to the realization as well.

“Six! He’s going for the secondary main generator!”

“ _There’s a secondary generator?!”_

The lights suddenly cut off with an audible dying hum, plunging Zarya into utter darkness. The comms went dead quiet at the same time, leaving Zarya with nothing more than her breath and frantic drum of her heartbeat.

But then, the lights started to turn back on. More than there had been on the emergency power. Screens and machines in other rooms began to flicker and jar to life, small beeps and clicks as things activated after nearly a decade of silence.

“ ** _Diagnosing systems._** _”_

The Russian that came from the built-in intercoms was mechanical, the disuse of its systems making the voice almost abyssal in origin. It made the hairs on the back of Zarya’s neck rise, turning her back to the door to look around the room to make sure nothing was going to come out from the awakening base to attack her.

“What… was that?” she spoke quietly into her communicator as it crackled in her ear, the signal restoring to a chaos of chatter that soon fell silent at her words.

“ _That… it has to be the base’s AI,”_ Winston explained. “ _But most of the later AIs in the bases either were deactivated or simply shut down and can no longer be reactivated. How-“_

“ ** _403 errors detected. Shutting down broken systems to prevent damage. Mandatory processes functioning at 78% efficiency. Updating protocols.”_**

“Winston,” Zarya said, very slowly. “Get your ass down here.” She then switched to Russian to speak to the others of her team. “Get out!”

And from her tone, everyone knew that she didn’t trust this AI one bit. None of them did, having fought omnics for so long. And while Zarya knew about Volskaya’s little trading ring going on with other omnics, Zarya wasn’t putting any trust in a deactivated AI that sounded like the Devil Himself was speaking from Hell to them.

“ ** _Protocols updated. New parameters set. Old records sealed. Security set to “Low”. Mordechai is now operational. Good afternoon, Sergeant Zaryanova.”_**

The address made Zarya freeze, her eyes flitting up to the ceiling with her hand hovering just a breath away from her ear. The sound of an air filter humming filled the silence, but Zarya could still hear her own heartbeat in her ears.

“How do you know who I am?” she asked the ceiling slowly, just as the elevator doors creaked open and the squat scientist and the mechanic filed out. Winston appeared just a few seconds after from the old stairwell, the only creature possibly well equip enough to navigate the damages by simply climbing around it.

“ ** _It was told to me,”_** the AI- Mordechai- explained. “ ** _As of my new protocols, you are set at the highest ranking in my functions. It is my duty to know who the chain of command is now that Overwatch is disabled.”_**

Her eyes dropped from the ceiling to the others, frowning at them. They seemed to be trying to listen to their own comms, perhaps trying to get a translation of what the AI was saying, since it didn’t seem to bother switching to English for their convenience. Good.

“If I am in charge,” Zarya began, still keeping to her native tongue. “Then I should be able to tell you to open the door.”

There was a pause, then. “ ** _You will be able to, yes.”_**

“Then open it,” she demanded, and it was another two to three heartbeats before the wall slowly slid back to expose the shadowed stairwell beyond.

“Oh! Well, that’s, uh, new.”

Winston’s words drew her back from the discussion with the AI, the English causing her to turn her eyes to them, as the gorilla stared at the newfound door and entirely taken aback at its existence.

“It’s an S-Class base design,” she told them without preamble, quoting the young man’s words as she stepped into the stairwell that led down into the dark. At least, until the occasional light flickered on, guiding them down the stairs.

“This wasn’t in the base’s blueprints,” the Swedish mechanic murmured, taking in everything with vivid interest. “Did the intruder tell you this?”

“He did,” she admitted. “Scrawny little bastard hasn’t been wrong so far.”

With the omission of a blasted AI, everything else he had said had proven true. The extra generator, the hidden stairs, the rooms that few knew about, it was all true. Annoying so. Just who was this kid?

The stairs bottomed out to a large room filled with the sound of machinery. Cold air was filtered in from vents, the smell of snow telling her that it was directly pulled from the surface, cooling off both the servers and the generator to prevent overheating. Several holographic screens were alight, numbers and diagnostics flitting across them as another was entirely dedicated to a growing number of problems that needed to be fixed within the base itself.

Metal scraped against metal as Zarya accidentally kicked a vent grate, causing it to skid across the floor. Looking up, she saw the open vent that disappeared up into the darkness, and came to realize that she had found the young man’s escape route.

“He’s gone,” she muttered, begrudgingly impressed as the others relaxed slightly, but fanned out nevertheless to explore the room.

“ ** _He has left you a message, Sergeant Zaryanova.”_** The AI’s voice wasn’t as demonic as it was in the upper floors, lower in pitch but not jarringly menacing that the degraded speakers in the rest of the base made it out to be. It sounded almost human, in a way machines could sound.

Lynx must be laughing at her back in Numbani over this.

“ ** _He wished me to convey to you that he really is sorry for keeping things from you, and my own programming has locked even myself out of accessing any data referring to him for you. But the base is now under the control of the Russian military, and I am under your command. Yours only, Sergeant Zaryanova.”_**

..She was right. Lynx _was_ laughing at her from whatever hole they crawled back into. The frustrated but resigned sigh that escaped her as she pinched the bridge of her nose didn’t go unnoticed by the others who were slowly catching up to the translating Russian that was probably going into their communicators at that very moment. Winston was looking a bit resigned himself at realizing that a previous Overwatch AI had now swapped ownership, while the other two simply seemed either confused or curious.

How in God’s green earth was she going to be able to explain this to Volskaya?

**Author's Note:**

> Like to see more? Please support me on [ko-fi!](https://ko-fi.com/regalmisfortune/)  
> 


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